Art shows to leave the house for in May 2025

Martin Creed reprises two of his most iconic and quietly powerful works in a timely celebration of joy, uncertainty and presence. From the glowing reassurance of Everything is going to be alright to a room flooded with balloons in Half the air in a given space, the exhibition leans into tenderness, play and the profound weight of lightness. A reminder that sometimes, simplicity is what holds us steady.

Everything Is Going To Be Alright opens Friday 9 May 2025, London, UK

Immortal Coil is a new participatory installation by Asad Raza in collaboration with High Line Art and Frieze. Visitors receive a seedling – clipped from the High Line’s own gardens – to carry along the elevated park and eventually take home, creating a living thread between city, ecology, and art. Musician and artist Kelsey Lu has composed an original score for the plants, and environmental writer Zoë Schlanger will contribute a lecture on plant life and interconnectedness.

For those in the city a little earlier, on 2 May, Raza will be in conversation at CARA about his commission in Pina, with the magazine’s founder, Catalina Imizcoz, and physics professor William Kinney. The talk will explore the cosmic scale of relationality, the exhibition as a site of intra-action, and how Raza’s commission, “Array”, engages with multiple historicities and the dialogical union of particles.

Immortal Coil takes place on 10 May 2025, beginning at The Shed, New York City, USA, limited RSVPs here. To RSVP for Raza’s talk at CARA on 2 May 2025, RSVP here

Freshly nominated for the 2025 Turner Prize, Rene Matić unveils a tender new body of work at Arcadia Missa. Idols Lovers Mothers Friends – an admission that Matić says the people who appear in the exhibition have “at one stage or another, been all of those things to them”. It’s a love letter and a reckoning, a reminder that love is anything but simple. The series meditates on kinship, grief, race and inherited love, told through portraits of those who have held, shaped or mirrored the artist. It’s a deeply intimate reflection on survival, selfhood and the complexity of mixed-race identity – where every photograph is both an embrace and an inquiry, and shadows become proof of presence.

Idols Lovers Mothers Friends runs from 25 April – 3 June 2025 at Arcadia Missa, London, UK

Painter Caroline Walker turns her gaze to motherhood and early years care in Mothering, a major new exhibition spanning five years of work, alongside new paintings. Known for her intimate yet cinematic portrayals of women at work and at home, Walker continues her investigation into female labour, visibility, and the quiet rituals of care. From the personal to the everyday, these works honour women’s experiences with tenderness, precision, and empathy. For those who can’t make the show, a monograph will follow in September.

Mothering runs from 17 May – 27 October 2025, at The Hepworth Wakefield, West Yorkshire, UK

A landmark exhibition of 30-plus works by Keith Haring, spanning 1980–1989, with some shown publicly for the first time. Tracing his iconography from radiant babies to levitating bodies, the show celebrates Haring’s kinetic, democratic, and deeply political vision. Known for transforming any surface within his reach, his lines danced across subway ad panels, foam, metal, glass, tarps and even human bodies. From street chalkings to nightclub sculptures, it’s a vivid snapshot of an artist who made New York – and the world – his canvas.

Surface to Air runs from 6 June – 27 July 2025 at Martos Gallery, New York City, USA

White Cube Bermondsey honours the late Richard Hunt with the first major European retrospective of the pioneering American sculptor. Spanning over six decades, Metamorphosis traces Hunt’s radical use of metal – from welded steel portraits of Emmett Till to soaring tree-like bronzes – shaped by myth, memory, and Black American history. A powerful meditation on growth, resilience, and transformation through form.

Metamorphosis – A Retrospective runs from 25 April – 29 June 2025 at White Cube Bermondsey, London, UK

A major new retrospective of Carrie Mae Weems opens at Gallerie d’Italia as part of this year’s EXPOSED Torino Foto Festival. Tracing her decades-long career, the show spans iconic series like Kitchen Table to recent video works, culminating in Preach – a world-premiere commission that explores Black spiritual traditions, resistance, and joy. Curated by Sarah Meister, former curator of the photography department at MoMA NYC, in collaboration with Aperture, the show foregrounds Weems’ singular voice in photography and social justice.

The Heart of the Matter runs from 17 April – 7 September 2025 at Gallerie d’Italia, Turin, Italy

Amoako Boafo’s first UK solo show is a powerful meditation on Black identity, intimacy and community. Centred around a re-creation of his childhood courtyard in Ghana, the exhibition features expressive new portraits and the artist’s first double-sided freestanding painting. Blending autobiography, architecture, and touch, Boafo invites us into his world – tender, textured and resolutely self-defined.

I Do Not Come to You by Chance runs from 10 April – 24 May 2025 at Gagosian, Grosvenor Hill, London

Campbell Addy’s first US institutional solo show has opened at SCAD FASH, spotlighting the British-Ghanaian artist’s singular vision. Renowned for reimagining beauty and visibility, Addy blends intimacy, narrative and world-building to expand the boundaries of fashion photography. Featuring work drawn from across his career, The Stillness of Elegance celebrates Blackness, identity and creative connection with style and soul.

The Stillness of Elegance runs until 7 September 2025 at SCAD FASH, Atlanta, Georgia

A powerful force in visual activism, Zanele Muholi brings two decades of work to SCAD, celebrating Black Queer life through fierce, empathetic portraiture. The show spans the series Somnyama Ngonyama, Brave Beauties, and Faces and Phases – each challenging erasure, confronting stereotypes and centring self-definition. With new lightbox works amplifying shadow and form, Muholi’s gaze remains defiant and tender.

Zanele Muholi runs until 6 July 2025 at SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia

The largest UK survey of Ed Atkins’ work to date traces 15 years of groundbreaking work. Fusing CGI, cinema, gaming and theatre, Atkins explores love, loss and selfhood in a weightless digital age. Expect mesmerising animations, eerie digital doubles, intimate Post-It drawings, and a new film shaped by grief and fantasy. Both tender and terrifying, it’s a raw meditation on reality, artifice, and human connection.

Ed Atkins runs from 2 April – 25 August 2025 at Tate Britain, London, UK

A pioneer of British feminist art, Su Richardson gets her long-overdue hometown spotlight with In Stitches at Midlands Arts Centre. The largest institutional retrospective of her five-decade career, the show spans crochet, collage and soft sculpture, exploring motherhood, care, illness and the maternal body. Playful yet deeply political, Richardson’s work stitches humour and heartbreak into every fibre. For those in London, Richardson’s works are on display at I DE V / l'étrangère, in an exhibition titled It’s In the Bag, which we will be visiting on May 28 for my monthly Art After Hours tour. Keep an eye on my Instagram for more information.

In Stitches runs from 8 March – 1 June 2025 at Midlands Art Centre, Birmingham, UK

Christine Sun Kim and Thomas Mader reclaim language and history by unpacking the ripple effects of a little-known but hugely consequential moment in Deaf history. At the 1880 Milan Conference, hearing educators voted to ban sign language in Deaf schools worldwide. Blending sculpture and film with humour and sharp critique, the duo explores language as home, protest, and inheritance. A quietly radical tribute to Deaf resistance and the power of being understood.

1880 THAT runs from 1 May – 27 October 2025 at the Wellcome Collection, London, UK

Klára Hosnedlová transforms the Hamburger Bahnhof’s vast historic hall into a haunting, hand-stitched dreamscape. embrace is her most ambitious work yet: nine-metre-high tapestries, cast glass, embroidered reliefs and concrete slabs conjure visions of utopia, memory and shifting political landscapes. Anchored in the borderlands of the Czech Republic, Hosnedlová's sculptural world stitches together home, history and hope with eerie precision.

embrace runs from 26 April – 29 September 2025 at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Germany